On Revelation
Revelation is this weird book grafted onto the end of the New Testament, a fever dream that doesn't really jibe with the rest of the story. I mean, you've got this creation story, the genealogy of some desert clans, some laws, a prophet turning rods into snakes, gospels, acts: the whole of it seems like a conventional narrative—part history, part myth—that is etiological in character. Revelation, by contrast, reads like Finnegan's Wake: so dense with allegory as to be practically incoherent, and therefore, open to every interpretation. With it, a sober tome of objective rules of right and wrong is reduced to hallucinogenic subjectivity. Why Revelation was not relegated along with the rest of biblical apocrypha, I don't know, but I can only assume it was a crowd-pleaser—after all, what pastime brings greater joy to religious folk than speculation about the destruction of Earth? Maybe it is just a giant metaphor for the nature of reality, and how nothing is ever as it seems? When one undergoes a revelation in their own life, everything that came before is cast into doubt: you've been deceived, you're living a lie, this isn't what you were meant for. All these seals and horses and trumpets need not represent a great tribulation shaking apart the kingdoms of the world, but rather, the small assumptions and compromises that create our individual lives. Revelation reveals that life is not simply about ideological dictums passed down to us through common experience, but rather, our awesome ability to lay waste to what came before, and create something new. Hence, the power of the Biblical God, who on page 1 created Heaven and Earth, passes into our hands. This power is frightning, shambolic, and mystifying to us, the effect of which is to produce a great battle between The Woman (creation) and The Dragon (destruction), ultimately resulting in a new person. Revelation, thus, is an invocation of free will amid the insistence of control. Despite appearances to the contrary, "life is but a dream."